Welcome to our New Home

We’ve done it — 40,000 books moved across a single weekend to our new home just around the corner at 8/4 Rawiri Place, Hobsonville. If you know Hobsonville, we are just over the road from the Hilton Brown Swimming School. Despite being in a semi-industrial area, it’s a really cool spot at the end of a no exit street with inspiring views of the neighboring farm land and nature reserve that doubles as a dog walking track for the neighbouring SPCA rescue puppies.

Like all things Book Hero — the move was organised chaos, but we got it done in record time. This time last month we hadn’t signed our new lease. A month before that we hadn’t even made the decision to move! Now we’re operating out of a space with the new racking installed and packed full of books and customer orders shipping drama free and without any downtime. We don’t like to muck around and we wouldn’t be happy if we weren’t doing whatever it takes to improve our range of books and service levels to customers. You told us you wanted more books delivered overnight anywhere in New Zealand — and that’s exactly what our bigger warehouse allows us to do!

Our new warehouse makes better use of available height and has room for five benches for fulfilling customer orders

Home for Book Hero is now a 400m2 warehouse with a 50m2 showroom, plus a similar size office to house our growing team. We’ve splurged on a fancy new coffee machine, new desks to replace the plywood timber from Bunnings, and our hand-me-down UE Boom has made way for a network of Sonos speakers. Added together these little upgrades make coming to work a real pleasure. We all feel spoiled and the environment is a nice upgrade for the team compared to our previous space which felt more like a shed in comparison.

Our new racking went up in less than a week and has over 1,000 picking locations

The usable storage space is roughly 4x the size of our last warehouse (even before we start using the extra height) and the dedicated showroom will get us one step closer to having a proper in-store browsing experience. The showroom is currently being used exclusively for online Pick Ups, but starting next week we’re starting renovations to transform it into a boutique bookstore you can browse with an adjoining lunchroom that can be opened up into an event space for author signings and bookclubs. We’ve barely finished setting up the warehouse, so local customers will have to wait a few more weeks before enjoying this new space beyond its current function for Pick Ups.

We had a team at both ends loading and unloading our rental van — 16.5 tonnes of books moved!

The move itself happened last weekend with an early 7am start on both Saturday and Sunday. We originally planned for a team of seven people (three at each end, plus a driver for our rental van) but a quick test run on Friday night confirmed our suspicion that extra help would be needed. An SOS txt was sent to friends and family, and thankfully our team of seven grew to a team of twelve — plus my Mum and Dad even stopped by on both days for coffee and homemade baking. It was awesome to have so much support from a hardworking group of people who believe in our vision and what we’re trying to create. It was hard work but also a lot of fun. Al calculated that we moved 16.5 tonnes of books which were all boxed up and lifted by hand multiple times at each end. It was exhausting work with most of us rediscovering muscles we never knew we had. A week later I’m still recovering!

None of us will forget the weekend in a hurry— and we had just enough fun to ensure we’ll be here again for the next move…

We’ve designed our new warehouse a little differently. We’ve moved our existing bookshelves across from Workspace Drive, and these are of a height where all but the very top shelf can be reached from the ground when shelving books or doing a picking run. The new racking we purchased has been installed to a height of 5 metres which means the top shelves will only be accessible with ladders or wave picking machines. While this will reduce efficiency and slow down picking to a degree, we made this choice to maximise the number of books we can store in our warehouse. As we improve our IT systems the higher shelves will be used for slower moving books and replenishment so that they’re accessed less frequently. We also have plenty of on-site storage for bulk books and our packaging consumables.

We’ve started filling our new racking up to human-pickable height and will go higher with the aid of machines

It’s crazy to think that in October we’ll be celebrating our 1st birthday and we’ll be doing it from a different warehouse to which we opened. We had two years left on our lease, which is evidence that growth has far exceeded our expectations. We’re thrilled to be operating out of a bigger space that allows us to keep more books in-stock and keep delivering on our promise to make books more available and accessible to Kiwis up and down the country.

We are enjoying the perks and treats of our new office and can’t wait to improve our in-store browsing experience

Thanks again to all our customers for supporting Book Hero and for giving us the opportunity to improve and grow our business. We can’t wait to fill our new warehouse with yet more amazing books and to make it easier than ever for Kiwis to rediscover a love for books and reading.

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